X - some of your comments are well taken and will be considered. I think that the music eds1275 is composing/has composed will be more than sufficient as, again my opinion, it is quite remarkable and vibrant, but I appreciate feedback on other methods of implementation. The playfield does present challenges in that it is swiss cheese. I think my art could be improved on but I disagree on the incongruity. The asteroids in your example are very nice asteroids. Fluoroscent printing might well lend itself to this theme but is beyond my resources and inclination.

I think your bringing up the fact that you had a great marketable idea for ICB conversion a long time ago that was "seriously sick" but not sharing it in a thread that is all about giving ideas to the community presents a poor impression. Kind of a, "nice project, I was going to do something much cooler but nice try" vibe. Again later with the "I have some ideas that would fix the problem" but no hint to what those ideas are. Well thanks man, good to know. Good for you then I guess.

I have little in the way of marketable skills (bad memory, a bit of a slow learned, and limited cranial capabilities with regards to stuff like math.. ) , as well as am now having trouble with physical capabilities (extreme food allergies = pains and extreme fatigue) .. so Im banking one one day.. .Possibly, to have some of these ideas bring in some kind of income.

If you have the desire to possible expand your projects output potentials... Id love to see what we could do... Maybe make a full on coin op run.. or at very least, a high end kit / or high-end assembled units.. High end, just meaning.. higher costs for the super-powered kits.

One thing Id realized, but have not tested / tried yet:

I believe the small ball size can be an issue with regards to challenge as well as issues in playability. It only takes a small amount of dust to cause enough friction, to slow and or stop a ball. With ICB - It was far worse.. because the entire machine had to be taken apart, full back-end ball trails and all.

Id like to try a Pinball.. and see how much more momentum may effect difficulty for the long term playability and enjoyment.

is it not the case that, in the water wheel scenario, should something go wrong, all LED's tied to the same resistor can go *poof*? And is this not why it is often recommended to have one resistor per LED?

The big advantages to wiring the LEDs in series like the left half of the water wheel diagram/schematic are the increased efficiency and greater fault tolerance.

To wire the 12 IR LEDs for this project, you can either do 4 of the groups of three LEDs on the left or 12 of the individual LEDs on the right.

Both configurations require current limiting resistors that dissipate the voltage drop as heat-- Left needs 4 (1 per group of 3 LEDs) that drop 0.5v (4 * 0.5 = 2)-- Right needs 12 (1 per LED) that drop 3.5v (12 * 3.5 = 42)-- The right option has to dissipate 21 times the heat that the left option does.

Next consider how much current each configuration uses-- These LEDs draw 100mA IIRC-- Left uses 100mA flowing through each of the 4 groups of three LEDs (400mA total)-- Right uses 100 mA flowing through each of the 12 LEDs (1200mA total)-- The right draws three times the current that the left option does

That brings us to the question of circuit protection if the current limiting resistor goes bad -- let's assume that it shorts out. (worst case scenario)-- The LEDs are rated for 1.5v IIRC-- Left now has 5v applied to 3 LEDs in series. This results in a 1.67v drop across each LED = 0.17v over rated voltage.-- Right now has 5v applied to 1 LED = 3.5v over rated voltage-- The right LED will be VERY bright for 1 or 2 seconds before it definitely burns out, the left LEDs might survive

This leads us to the question of what happens if an LED goes bad.- A burned out LED stops current flow (most likely scenario) -- Left would have 3 LEDs go dark (1 burns out like a fuse, protecting the other 2) -- Right would have 1 LED go dark = slightly easier troubleshooting (finally a win for the right side configuration )- A shorted LED (HIGHLY unlikely, almost certainly caused on the wiring end, not the light end) -- Left will burn out the other two LEDs in the group and slightly dim the other groups (less current flowing through them) -- Right will slightly dim the other LEDs (less current flowing through them)

The answer to your "one resistor per LED" question depends on the configuration.

If *only* one resistor is used to protect a bunch of LEDs wired in parallel, it will have to be large enough to handle all the current flow and heat dissipation for the whole setup.

When a carbon resistor has too much current flowing through it, the resistor starts to cook itself and break down.

As it breaks down, the resistance decreases, causing more current to flow through it, causing it to break down further . . . . until it becomes a short circuit.

Less resistance = less voltage drop across the resistor.

All the LEDs will be over-voltaged and burned out, probably before the resistor breaks down completely.

For protection puprposes, the three 1.5v LEDs on the left half of the water wheel diagram are effectively a single, much more robust, 4.5v LED.

Some more art examples for feedback. Put together a rough draft sideart, nothing too fancy - just to get a feel for it, and changed some colors around on the playfield along with subduing the background quite a bit. The quality goes to hell when I get these internet sized. The full size PNGs are like 100mb each and the PSDs are pushing a gig but the detail on the color is so nice at that full resolution. It looks all grided out and muddy at this size.

So Space Gal is a blend of the first two options with more pastel coloring and the asteroids got a color treatment just to see how it would look. I'm digging the updated Space Gal but not sold on coloroids. Original posted for comparison so you don't have to flip back and forth.

And sideart, might try to incorporate one of those classic rolling pinball type images to give it a bit of movement. Rather than mock up a spaceship I think it would be nice just to show the ball as that is what serves as your "ship" and besides, who is to say that the ideal spacecraft isn't a metallic sphere with a hidden ion drive or some nonsense. Kind of like a pinball with a comet trail curving outside the graphic from upper left to lower right.

I love it except for one part. I'm not a fan of the helmet. I don't know why, just not liking the glass part of it. I like the electronics on it, even the part on top, but the globe, not so much. Maybe a glass visor coming out of the top part or something? Oh well.

The rest of it is great. I love the stippling affect on the asteroids, very comic book looking.

Had a wisdom tooth taken out today - gave me the afternoon to play with the art. Think I'm about ready to put a fork in it. Again, sorry for lowrez uploads. Once it's all said and done there will be links for fullsize downloads.

Sideart

Playfield

CPO - no change to this one, will pick up the highlight colors through the plastics.

Well gentlemen I think the artwork, and well the whole concept really - looks just fine as is.Not sure I have ever seen a ICB here in the UK and just watched a gameplay vid to get a better idea and boy does it look like fun combined with inebriation .

If a run was ever to happen I bet you would sell as many as you were prepared to make.

I think the mix of radial half-tone and flat skin shade is actually pretty nice, I preferred the green asteroids though. All in all, it hits the retro sci-fi mark as intended. It's ironical really, all this talk about shading and here I am endlessly playing with and experimenting with toon shaders applied to 3D objects to try and achieve a cel shading I'm happy with. Heh, I'm close now, real close.

Anyway, onya L.C. for coming up with different and interesting projects like this, ed does a great job on the music stuff doesn't he?

I, for one, love the art, and I think the space babe is perfect for it. I love the gradients and how it is not in any way trying to be "3d" or "photorealistic" with shadowing, but rather a pretty pure "pop art" style. I think you nailed it!

You mentioned that the plastics on the CP will introduce the highlight color.. are you going with purple controls then? I love the gray with purple, and adding the green for highlight fits the style to perfection, and the reddish blond hair gives it just enough pop! Did you draw this from scratch or start with some basic pinup art and go from there? Either way I applaud your photoshop skills, I have enough experience with photoshop to know just how much talent you need to achieve something of this grade. Beyond my talents, no doubt.

BTW, after reading X2's critiques of colors here and in my latest project thread, I think he is color blind..

He's colorblind, he's posted stuff before from a "colorblind artist friend" that was almost certainly his work.

Being colorblind myself, I can say that things often look rather weird to us that look fine to the rest of you. Particularly all this obsession over 'shading', it's probably because some of the half tones look off in his eyes. I generally possess the self-awareness to keep my mouth shut about others color choices, though. (and keep my own choices to primary colors)

My issue with it was the rampant and needless sexualization of yet another woman in this hobby's artwork. But, wait, aren't I the Konkey Dong guy? Why, yes, yes I am and that was my 'comment' on the matter. I helped a guy do a custom translite for a Chicago Coin Astronaut once, and we basically plastered the thing with space chicks and ray guns. Not ALL of them are begging for the player to come and rip off their space suits. I haven't actually unwrapped my copy of the new Tomb Raider game but it seems like they did a much better job of the attractive woman that can fend for herself.

Here's a couple of examples I netswiped:

vs

I'd prefer to see something along the lines of the first image. I can get my porn elsewhere. It's awesome that he's going to release all the artwork assets so we can tweak as we see fit. No further comment needed.

So for you it is clothes, not the curves that are the line between "OK" and "smut"? So if the space babe in question had a skin tight suit that covered her thighs, midriff, and arms, it would be acceptable to you? Or is it her pose that you have a problem with?

Just wondering, personally I don't see it as overly sexual, and to me, pinup is not porn it is art. But then I am dating a former stripper who has been in front of the camera a time or two, so I suppose my views on sexuality are probably a little different from yours..

I get where PBJ is coming from and I think I understand the motive behind Konkey Dong as a black humor parody - I also respect how he has handled the conversation and yes all the files will go up as I said. As to whether or not Space Gal is exploitive I will leave that to the individual - I recognize that I do have a huge penchant for the pin-up style (recall the Fieldhouse sideart) and am very accepting that it isn't everyone's cup of tea.

I'll probably play with the greens some more based on Ond's feedback but my gut tells me I'll stick with the purples and grab the greens through the controls to pull it together. Also, the 7 segment displays are green, so that'll be nice.

Would it have been any different if it was known a female is the artist?

I don't see it as that big of a deal. There are artists (or rather, a group) like CLAMP that do a very interesting job portraying women.

To me, personally, I would give her a full body suit (like the first image shown by PBJ) not because I'm a prude but because I can't realistically see her being in a hostile environment necessitating a full helmet but wearing such a skimpy outfit. I also have a penchant for brunettes. However, since I have no plans to put her, specifically, on my wall any time soon, all of those details are rather moot.

Personally every time I come back to this thread and see the image of the space girl all that`s in my head is the opening scene of barbarella.And believe me that is a good thing.What are peoples thoughts on the way women/barbarella is portrayed in that scene?.

johnrt

Here we have like the coolest project I've seen in many moons, and then you guys spend the time discussing a little piece of the artwork? The artwork will ALWAYS be a personal preference. There's NO WAY you can make everyone happy with the artwork. I want to see more of the project itself. Technical solutions, WIP pictures and everything else.

I want to see more of the project itself. Technical solutions, WIP pictures and everything else.

That's why I keep coming back. I'm watching this thread. I'm really curious which IC he's using as a 10/4 for ten switched inputs. The only IC I know of has the 10th bit implied. Same goes for his choice of servo over steppers or plain jane motors for the bar. I'm opting for the latter since I don't really feel it's a good idea to hack servos for this. And all the other intriguing design choices.

Only servos I've seen are limited rotation. About 180 degrees of rotation, sometimes more, not usually less. If they're continuous rotation it was always because they've been hacked. Their stops usually ground out and the potentiometer modified to always read center. Did a Google search and it seems you can get them already made but the selection seems small. Though I would ask that if you have a servo without the positional feedback, is it a servo anymore? Or is it just a nicely packaged motor with a PWM speed circuit? (no more smilie ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- from this point forward)

My comment about not using them stems from hacking the servos. I fried more than a few motors in one fashion or another and don't have a desire to modify a servo down the road when trying to replace one in my cab. I was eyeing bone standard NEMA mount motors looking for a nice control circuitry to go with it, but I can't for the life of me figure out how much force I need to do what I want. But since you seem to have handily solved that, I'm very curious as to where you sourced said motors. I kind of wanted to wait and see but cest la vie I guess. Everybody bickering about the chick probably killed the mood there.

The only 10/4 I could ever recall is from the 7400 series. It's all I've been working with lately. Never occurred to me to check the 4000 series of IC's. A very interesting way to get only-one-bit-is-flipped down to fewer lines. Even if it was a "10"/4 from the 7400 series. A 10/4 won't work in my circuit but it is a great idea nonetheless. If I was jonesing for pins I either serialized the input or cheated and used my output and strobed the switches. But use a 10/4? No never even crossed my mind.

I like the use of the Pi for audio but are you leveraging all of the Pi's power? You haven't shared yet. I have a different target and different distribution but, with a Pi, you have all sorts of super cool capabilities at your disposal that can be integrated into the game.

I ditched the LED digit display entirely. IMHO it grew too complex with virtually microscopic returns. I might redesign the circuitry but I'll have to settle for a crappy looking board. I have everything except a PCB to solder to.

It's all good, I didn't take it as an attack, just wanted to clarify where you were going. I've done quite a few "hacks" on my projects through the years and am usually quite proud of them. So far this project is hack free tho (unless you count the home made drive wheels and mounts) and that's because I very much want this to be something that can be replicated. Hacks add a lot of complexity. There's a reason you don't see a lot of wireless hot-swappable TRON sticks with in-game switching from 8 way to 4 way for the light cycle level. It's a holy rolling PITA to setup right.

We have discussed moving to PWM equipped motors but it's a price hike of about $30-$40 iirc. I've already installed the units and tested them out using the micro maestro to put them through a full range of movement on the actual playfield with no issue, in fact, because I was using simple movement scripts just for a quick test I had trouble getting them to go slow enough for the game to be playable. I could get a "crawl" pretty well but then I'd jump to "instant death" with the next speed hike - again just me fiddling in the garage and not using any of IDS's code or work he's already done.

If they don't work then we just move up to the next more robust option. At roughly $10 a pop they are too good to not test all the way to ground. If they don't work flawlessly and consistently we'll move on. That's the reason I haven't posted the full parts list, I don't want anybody to waste any money on something that might go into the proto/Alpha Unit but doesn't go into the final.

The pi - yeah, it really is overkill when used just for audio. It was not an easy decision for that reason, but I could not find anything which could come close to it in either price OR performance. For the same price as a pi model A, you can get some rudimentary things to play a single audio stream. I've also seen other boards at twice the price unable to do what a pi can do with audio. We also wanted the ability to overlay sounds - so we could have the background music going, then overlay some effect or voice at key moments. I had put a lot of effort into optimizing code on the Freescale to pull audio (uncompressed waveform data) from an SD card, push it out through the DAC pin and through a simple amp chip, but this was limited in capability (bitrate, single stream, etc) and consumed a lot of cycles, make game code more challenging.

The pi can not only play most any format of audio, as well as combine multiple streams, it also has SD built in - this simplifies the microcontroller code further by removing support for SD and freeing up some pins. The config file and high-score are stored on the SD. Offloading functions to a complete separate unit has other benefits as well (freeing up compute cycles, parallelism, ...)

So, as of today, the freescale connects to the pi via USB, and they use serial over USB to talk to each other. The KL25z is "master" - sending commands to the pi, and getting basic responses back. Commands include "play that tune", "give me the config file", etc The serial baud rate is set quite high so it's not a terrible burden. It's working well so far.

One last point - as was stated earlier, the pi can do so much more. And the latest pi's have many more I/O pins as well. To my knowledge, however, there are no pin driven interrupts, and there are other limitations (#pwm pins, preemptive multitasking OS issues, voltage and current considerations, etc) that make it unable to take over everything the KL25z is doing. If I thought the pi could do it all, I'd drop the microcontroller.

I wasn't thinking of having the Pi pick up the IO. I looked at that too and, quite frankly, it's better to treat it like a computer rather than to try and make it a glorified micro some are so apt to do.

I was thinking along the lines of things like, are you able to push new firmware out to the KL25z from the Pi? I intend on including the tools to push new firmware to my child modules. Package an update and, in theory, the entire system updates itself.

I didn't consider leveraging the Pi for the SD card to get config data. I didn't think in that direction. Did you consider the B version to send high scores to a central server? Or to push firmware or game mode updates remotely via the network?

Some interesting ideas I had not considered, and if time permits, we may get there one day. The pi code could obviously run on either model, I was just trying to keep costs down with the 'A', didn't see the need for an extra USB port and the ethernet port, but you present reasons why it might be desirable. OTOH, you could drop in a USB based wifi adapter into an 'A' and go wireless as well. Lots of options, but until i finish the game code....

I have a few more days with my niece visiting, she is helping me finish up the smurfs machine and her own little Arcade Safari machine, but after that (starting tuesday next week) I will be back bouncing down existing audio and working that panic tune.

I'm building all the cut paths in Artcam to export to Gcode. Won't be able to cut until my buddy's new CNC machine arrives and we get it up and going. (He ordered 6 weeks ago, should arrive this month).

eds1275 has cranked out the panic tune and is wrapping up the sound.

IDS is still doing all the programming but at this point is waiting on me to get the proto up to him so he can move beyond bench top testing.

We've each got over a year in this. We aren't going anywhere, we're just doing it as it can be done and no, X2, is incapable of affecting anything I do so don't worry about that

Hopefully by the end of this month to the middle of next month we will have sawdust but I have to help assemble and troubleshoot the as of yet undelivered CNC first.